KDE Transition Status. Adeodato Simó [5]reported that the archive nowcontains versions of qt-x11-free, aRts, and kdelibs for allarchitectures that depend on the new C++ library. Therefore he askeddevelopers to update the packages that depend on one of theselibraries and enclosed a list of maintainers and packages.

License for Wiki Content. Geert Stappers [6]wondered which licenseshould be used for the [7]content of a Wiki system, which is intendedto be modified and improved by others. Nathanael Nerode [8]explainedthat Debian is working with the [9]Creative Commons people on a draftof a new version of their license that should be DFSG-free, since thecurrent one isn't. Andrew Suffield [10]proposed to use the MIT licenseunless there is a really good reason not to do so.

Using the PHP License for Packages. Charles Fry [11]noticed that thecurrent version of the [12]PHP license (version 3.0) contains severalclauses which are specific to the PHP language, and eitherinapplicable or even problematic for applications written in PHP.Francesco Poli [13]suggested to use the 2-clause BSD license and usethe PHP license only for PHP itself.

Curl reverts to OpenSSL. Domenico Andreoli [14]announced that he haspaused the plan to link [15]curl library against [16]GNU TLS insteadof [17]OpenSSL which he considered after license concerns. Theupstream developer was [18]not happy to restrict the binary packagesto either libraries since their implementations contain partiallydifferent features.

Purging Database Data? Philipp Kern [19]wondered under whichcircumstances user-supplied data should be removed upon packageremoval. Joey Hess [20]confirmed that using debconf during postrmpurge is fine as long as the script checks whether [21]debconf isinstalled and falls back to reasonable behaviour if it isn't.

New Runlevel Design. Timo Aaltonen [22]wondered if there were plans tochange the runlevel concept more into the direction of the [23]LinuxStandard Base. John Hasler [24]asserted that most probably there won'tbe a change into supporting multiple multi-user runlevels. HamishMoffatt [25]explained the emergency mode which is what several people[26]expect as single-user mode.

Quality of the README File. Wolfgang Borgert [30]gave several examplesof confusing, irrelevant, redundant, or useless README filesdistributed in Debian packages. He asked maintainers to not includethe upstream README file in the binary package, if it's not reallyimportant to the user and strip irrelevant information otherwise.

Differing Library Memory Consumption. Stephane Chauveau [31]noticedthat a self-compiled GTK library consumes less (140 kB) memory fornon-static data than the one provided by Debian. Thiemo Seufer[32]explained that this does not matter due to copy-on-write done bythe kernel. The reason for this is still unknown.

Debian QA Meeting. Martin Zobel-Helas [33]reported about the Debian QA[34]meeting that will take place at the Technical University ofDarmstadt from the 9th to the 11th of September. The attendants willgive talks on various topics such as portability issues, theinstaller, lintian, autotools, new maintainer, collaborativemaintenance and others.

Orphaned Packages. 3 packages were orphaned this week and require anew maintainer. This makes a total of 203 orphaned packages. Manythanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the FreeSoftware community. Please see the [74]WNPP pages for the full list,and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA: if youplan to take over a package.

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter.We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian communityand report about what is going on. Please see the [90]contributingpage to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving yourmail at [91]dwn@debian.org.